New Yorker Fiction Review #240: "The Resident Poet" by Katherine Dunn

Review of a short story from the May 11, 2020 issue of The New Yorker...

I love going into a story with absolutely zero context, especially when I have never heard of the author. I find it's much, much better to read a story without bringing anything to the table in terms of expectations or preconceived notions about what I'm about to read.

Apparently, "The Resident Poet" was written by the late Katherine Dunn (author of Geek Love, died in 2016) back in the early 1970s. From the context clues in the story -- the lack of cell phones , certain lingo, the way the characters dress -- I could definitely have guessed the story was set in the pre-80s. However, Katherine Dunn's prose is as fresh as if it were written today. 

If there is a way to make an elicit affair between a professor and a college student seem "un-sexy," then Katherine Dunn found it in "The Resident Poet." Which is convenient, because that was precisely the story's intention. 

In this short story, a college freshman meets up with her poetry professor on a rainy Friday night for a weekend tryst. The professor is married. The student is more sexually experienced than she lets on. Neither one likes the other one too much. They both participate in the affair as some sort of "ritual" or performance that needs to be carried out. He plays the pompous professor dallying with one of his students, she plays the innocent, doe-eyed coed enthralled by an erudite, older man. There is not a shred of genuine interaction between the two of them and, as a result, they have stilted conversations and cold, bad sex. 

Although it's far more entertaining to read about people having good, exciting sex, what Katherine Dunn does in this story is pretty incredible. She takes what is usually a salacious subject matter and renders it self-consciously bland and performative, laying-bare how we sometimes lead ourselves to do things we don't really want to do, and perform "roles" we really don't want to perform, because...why? Here is where it gets interesting, in "The Resident Poet."

Is the main character performing this act because she feels pressured into it? Hardly. That would have made sense to tell that kind of story, especially given the time period, but that would have been a completely different kind of story. Is she pushing herself nervously to the edge of the high-dive, tempted and yet frightened? Wrong again. And...again...that would have made this a completely different kind of story. 

Instead, the main character seems to be undertaking this particular sexual (mis)adventure as part of her self-imposed sexual apprenticeship. She saw the chance to participate in a little sexual tourism, so to speak, and took it. As it turns out, she is not pleased with her tour; however, there are no grand lessons learned, no stark realizations, and no "new leafs" to be turned over as a result of this one-time experiment with the resident poet. It seems as though, for a young woman already growing a bit jaded with casual, less-than-fulfilling sex, this experience will serve to make her a little bit more selective in whom she chooses for her next adventure, after realizing that she'd much rather have spent the rainy weekend curled up in bed with a book than in the company of the resident poet.

Without getting too graphic or personal here (while it is MY blog, the internet is forever...) we've all probably gone through some various form of this sexual initiation or apprenticeship. A sort of trial and error process through which we figure out what we like and what we don't like and who we are as sexual beings. Some of us go through the process quickly. Others it takes a longer time. For the main character in "The Resident Poet" I get the sense that she is in the seventh or eight inning of a nine inning ballgame, and that the clumsy, "groping in the darkness" part of her journey to sexual maturity is almost complete.